IEW

TNO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast-Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek) is one of the major applied research and technology organisations in Europe. With a staff of approximately 3000 and an annual turnover of close to a billion Euros, TNO is carrying out applied R&D on, among others, healthy living, industrial innovation, traffic & transport, buildings & infrastructure, circular economy, energy technology, and safety & security. TNO is involved in many international programmes, including especially EU-funded collaborative projects.

The former ECN (Stichting Energieonderzoek Centrum Nederland) has become part of TNO since 1 April 2018. The new “ECN part of TNO” department is a symbiosis of all energy R&D activities of ECN and TNO, and is thereby the leading institute for energy research in the Netherlands with about 600 researchers. The R&D of ECN-TNO contributes to transforming the current energy system into one without CO2 emissions by 2050. ECN-TNO consists of several main innovation programmes: solar energy, wind energy, built environment, CO2-neutral industry, fuels & feedstock, system integration, and societally embedded energy transition. The Geological Survey of the Netherlands is part of ECN-TNO.

The Energy Transition Studies group of ECN-TNO employs about 70 researchers who cover a wide variety of academic disciplines. Energy Transition Studies focuses on the political, economic, and social aspects of energy technology implementation. It possesses a broad range of different modelling tools, mostly developed in-house. These include e.g. simulation, optimization, and management models. Its EU models cover electricity markets, renewables, power generation, and fossil fuels, and enable investigating a broad range of scenarios and policy instruments, among which GHG emissions trading.

The Energy Transition Studies group of ECN-TNO plays an important role in performing R&D projects and multidisciplinary policy studies aimed at Dutch policy makers at the local, regional and national level, as well as companies and stakeholders in the energy transition. At the international level, and notably in Europe, ECN-TNO participates actively in a large variety of projects, programmes, networks, and other institutions in the field of energy R&D, policy research and advice. Over the past decade, ECN-TNO has participated in many international projects on energy technology and policy research financed by European programmes such as FP6, FP7, and HORIZON 2020. ECN-TNO has conducted a large variety of energy and climate policy studies in service contracts for several DGs of the European Commission, both as project leader and as team member.